Funny Mask is a fun application which tries to detect faces on the screen, then customises them with clipart-type masks (hats, glasses, wigs, more).

To use the program, launch it and click "Draw On Screen". Funny Mask uses OpenCV (the Open Source Computer Vision Library) to look for faces, and adds one of twelve silly customisations to anything it finds.

By default the program chooses a mask at random. If you have a preference, click the arrow to the right of "Draw On Screen" and select that option from the list.

If you want to save the results then of course you could press PrtSc, and paste the image into a graphics program. But it might be easier to just press Capture, which grabs the full screen and saves it as FunnyMask.png in the Funny Mask folder. (Unfortunately it always uses this file name, so clicking Capture again will overwrite the previous image.)

Funny Mask didn't always work for us. It had problems recognising faces which were cropped too tightly, for instance. And if a face is tilted then the mask won't always be in the right place.

The program got it right enough times to be worth trying, though. It's fun and easy to use, great as a way for kids to mess around on the PC. And there's a bonus extra for the more experienced: the bundled 12 masks are just PNGs with a transparent background, so it's easy to customise them or create more.

Verdict:

Kids should have fun with this, for a minute or two anyway (you might need to create extra masks to hold their attention for any longer).

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."